The present invention relates to conducting trusted data transactions over a bus in an electronic system.
The concept of property has changed dramatically in the past several years. Once thought of as being limited to the physical, property has come to include the intangible, such as the highly organized collections of binary information that are our movies, music, and software. Just as the idea of property has changed, so has the idea of property theft. Since these movies, music, and software are just ones and zeros, if not properly protected, they can be stolen and reproduced with perfect accuracy.
Common places where this property can be found are computers, gaming, and other types of electronic systems. Property moves from circuit to circuit in these electronic systems over buses, such as PCIE, HyperTransport, AGP, and others. While on one of these buses, data may be vulnerable to theft. This threat may come in the form of hardware or software.
The hardware threat may come in the form of an add-in card, for example, an add-in card inserted in a PCI slot of a desktop computer. It may also come in the form of a plug in-card attached to the back of computer, or to a USB or Ethernet port. Software attacks can take many forms, among them software that deceives a host CPU by masking the true identity of a hardware device. In this way, an unauthorized device can hide from detection. Another type of software attack involves hijacking an authorized device in order to do the hijackers bidding.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide secure transactions across a bus such that data transfers are not subject to theft. One way of doing this is to use encryption. But encryption requires encrypting data to be transferred and decrypting the data once it is received. This involves a great deal of computational overhead and complexity.
Thus, it is desirable to provide secure transactions across a bus without the requirement of encrypting the transferred data.